ans for working good, not only to
their own households, not only to the social circle about them, but to
the nation at large. All these influences they can bring into action
far more effectually by adhering closely to that position which is not
only natural to them, but also plainly allotted to them by the revealed
Word of God. In no position of their own devising can they do that work
half so well.

Political and social corruption are clearly the great evils to be
dreaded for our country. We have already gone far enough in the path of
universal manhood suffrage to feel convinced that no mere enlargement
of the suffrage has power to save us from those evils. During half a
century we have been moving nearer and nearer to a suffrage all but
universal, and we have, during the same period, been growing more
corrupt. The undisguised frauds at elections, the open accusations of
bribery in legislative assemblies, the accusations of corruption
connected with still higher offices--of these we read daily in the
public prints. And these accusations are not disproved. They are
generally believed. It is clear, therefore, that something more
effectual than universal manhood suffrage is needed to stem the
torrent. And it is simply ridiculous to suppose that womanhood suffrage
can effect the same task. Who can believe that where men, in their own
natural field, have partially failed to preserve a healthful political
atmosphere, an honest political practice, that women, so much less
experienced, physically so much more feeble, so excitable, so liable to
be misled by fancy, by feeling, are likely, in a position foreign to
their nature, not only to stand upright themselves, but, like Atlas of
old, to bear the weight of the whole political world on their
shoulders--like Hercules, to cleanse the Augean stables of the
political coursers--to do, in short, all that man has failed to do? No;
it is, alas! only too clear that something more than the ballot-box,
whether in male or female hands, is needed here. And it is the same in
social life. The public prints, under a free press, must always hold up
a tolerably faithful mirror to the society about them. The picture it
displays is no better in social life than in political life. We say the
mirror is tolerably faithful, since there are heights of virtue and
depths of sin alike unreflected by the daily press. The very purest and
the very foulest elements of earthly existence are left out of the
p